Aren't You Glad Facebook Doesn't Make Software for Nukes? You Should be!

Aren't You Glad Google Dropped out of Bidding for That $10 Billion Pentagon AI Contract?!

The Best Recruiting Software on the Planet. Really?

From the product website: "[Product Name] is Quite Simply The Best Recruiting Software on the Planet." I don't know about that, but you sure have The Most Informative and User-Friendly Error Messages on the Planet :-P

Unless You Really Want to Look Like a Fool, Don't Save on Business Analysis

I have just heard Tom MacDonald's news report "Philly bike share glitch creating hassle for riders looking to upgrade" on the radio.

According to the report, Indego, a public bicycle sharing system in Philadelphia, offers two membership plans: you can "buy a monthly Indego30 membership at $15 that gives you unlimited one-hour-rides or pick the $10 per-year IndegoFlex membership and pay $4 for each trip."

But you cannot change your plan!

A Classic Example of "Broken As Designed"

This is an extremely annoying "feature" I keep stumbling upon in all kinds of software, be it customer-facing or "internal" business applications. I have been seeing this for years (if not decades) now, and it doesn't seem to be going away.

Imagine a web site that sells tours (just an easy to understand example). On a page, you see two dependent drop-down lists: one with continents and the other with countries (again, this is just an easy to understand example). Say, you select "Europe" from the first drop-down list and "Albania" from the second. The page refreshes and displays something like "Your search returned no results". You keep trying, and -- after 50+ attempts -- it turns out that the site only offers tours that begin in Germany (DE), Spain (ES), and Italy (IT). The other 50 or so European countries on the second drop-down list are there for absolutely no reason (except to annoy users). Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

When Marketing Budgets Hugely Exceed Those of QA: Thoughts Triggered by Yet Another Bug-Ridden Applicant Tracking System

If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products 

as they do on advertising, they wouldn't have to advertise them.

Will Rogers

Around 2008, I became interested in Applicant Tracking Systems or, rather, what I thought back then an ATS should do and how it should do it. I even toyed with the idea of developing my own, but the interest must have been not strong enough for this idea to go beyond a modest in-house working prototype used to train students. I am still interested in this type of software applications, which now manifests itself mostly in what I call a recurring irresistible itch to find bugs in them (Once a Software Tester, Always a Software Tester). So, here is one for your... amusement.



Let's say you are an employer using an ATS from a reputable SaaS (software as a service) provider.

A job seeker visits your web site, goes to its career section and from there is taken to your ATS.

Note: Technically, it isn't really your ATS since you just "rent" a "slice" on a multi-tenant ATS provided by a SaaS vendor. The applicant may or may not be aware of the fact that he/she is using third-party software, which depends, among other things, on how tightly the ATS is integrated into your web site and how familiar with this type of systems he/she is.

The candidate registers, begins the job application submission process and, a few minutes later, sees something like this:

Screenshot 1 (click to enlarge)

In case you didn't get it, let me show you another one. The screenshot below is from the site of another company, but the ATS SaaS provider and the bug are the same (pay attention to where the red arrows are pointing):

Screenshot 2 (click to enlarge)

Another Blogger Bug: In order to select an item from your on-line storage, please sign in

In a comment on my previous Blogger-mess-related post, Blogger Error "You have logged out from another location...", Blogger user Miyaka reported another "curious behavior" of the world's most popular blogging platform operated by the world's largest Internet company. Less than two days later, I was experiencing the same problem myself.

I must say that these Blogger glitches are getting really annoying.

Blogger Error: You have logged out from another location...

A couple of hours ago, I was hit by the infamous "You have logged out from another location. Do you want to log in again?" error on Blogger, which, as it turned out, has been known since at least September 2012 (see this "known issue").

Thank God, These Guys Are Not Surgeons

I don't spend much time on social networking sites, including LinkedIn, but, whenever I visit them, within the first couple of minutes, I always stumble on some bugs. Here is one I found today on LinkedIn (in order to actually see what's going on, watch the video in HD and full screen; it's a raw screen recording):


If you are familiar with how LinkedIn works, the video should be self-explanatory. If it isn't, continue reading.

Unless You Really Want to Look Like a Fool, Don't Save on Software Testing

From time to time, I just can't resist the temptation to do some ad hoc testing of business web applications I run into on the Internet. I've been doing it for years off and on (no penetration or any other disruptive testing, of course), and, although I don't keep statistics, my subjective feeling is that web apps have gotten much buggier lately. What's even worse is that the nature of the bugs I come across these days makes me wonder whether whoever is in charge of those applications just slaps them together as quickly as possible and puts them in production without any testing at all.

If you think I am exaggerating, let me give you an example.

Google Voice for Android: Another Crappy Update from Google

Google Voice version 0.4.2.54 (on the phone displayed as 40254) for Android version 1.6 is broken.

Moodle 2.0 Course Backup: DDL SQL Execution Error

Moodle 2.0 fails to backup courses (and quizzes) returning the following error: "DDL sql execution error".

It appears that this error occurs if the database user does not have the permission to create temporary tables.